Viral: Chatroulette Users Play Real-Life Zombie Shooter

Chatroulette has always been that weird part of the internet that everyone dreads venturing into, but courtesy of that which killed the cat, and the prospect of actual human contact, we still risk it. While users might often find themselves stumbling onto an unwelcome sights, visits to the public video chat site do, in rare cases, pay off. A YouTube video by UK film studio Realm Pictures currently making rounds on the web, is proof of the latter.

The video shows a bunch of unsuspecting Chatroulette users being treated to a live-action first-person shooter set in a zombie-infested world. The protagonist of the interactive game, voiced over by a much less obnoxious version of Duke Nukem, asks participants to take the reigns, and as they reciprocate with verbal directions, a mix of hilarity and epicness ensues.

If you’re familiar with both classic and modern FPS games, you’ll appreciate the amount of work the creators put into setting the stage for the interactive sessions. The level of detail and authenticity of the whole thing, along with the idea itself, of course, is probably what helped this video go viral. It wasn’t meant to be just for internet hilarity either. Participants could actually fail each step along the way if they made a wrong turn, watching the protagonist drowning in a sea of flesh-eating extras, blood splatters and bouts of his own manly screams. Those who followed all the right ques got to finish the game and meet the team behind the effort.

Watch the entire video below:

The sessions were superimposed with a HUD reminiscent of the original Doom, which occasionally displayed flashing prompts to highlight a new weapon or ask the participant to hit a key. There were guns, pain killers and mini-puzzles hidden throughout the surprisingly sizable ‘level’, and if that wasn’t enough, players got to mow zombies down with a mounted turret and blast the game’s boss in the face with a rocket launcher, to which one player rightly exclaimed, “this is epic!”

As Realm Pictures explains in a behind-the-scenes video, the entire project cost £900 and was set up with the help of a company called Red House Mysteries that organizes treasure hunts, a cosplayer in his huge modified space marine armor as the game’s demon boss, a motorcycle helmet fitted with a GoPro camera attached to a TeraDek Cube for wireless HD video streaming, and extras from a nearby town.

Although it would seem this was a one-time thing, we’re hoping this isn’t the last we’ve heard of the team’s Chatroulette escapades.

I'm an engineer, blogger, and graphic designer who loves creating and experimenting with different forms of online content when he's not looking for a mix of inspiration and escape in PC gaming, comic books and anime. You can find me on Twitter and Google+.